Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Sous Vide in a bucket

I am
becoming obsessed with cooking meat this way.
Mainly because cooking meat is something that I always used to fuck
up. Trying to cook steak or lamb chops
would always result in a raw interior and a burned exterior or just dry,
rubbery bullshit. I even made fish tough
once. How. The. Fuck.

So learning
how to cook SV at home has been really worthwhile for me. There are machines that you can buy now for a
few hundred dollars but really, for me at home playing around, I can do without
the machinery. It comes out so perfectly
it’s almost like cheating.

A quick
google of “sous vide at home” will provide a number of links to home-made
machines and alternative solutions to playing with your food and having it turn
out amazingly well.

There are
two things you need to properly sous vide meat: a zip lock bag and water at a
constant temperature. Professionally you
would have the meat vacuum sealed in plastic however you can get the home 90%
version by filling a large bowl with water, placing your meat inside the
ziplock bag, half sealing the bag, then nearly submerging the thing into the
bowl. The water will force the majority
of the air out of the bag. Once it is
almost entirely submerged, seal the bag then take it out of the bowl. Done.

In the past
I have cooked Salmon and duck breast SV at home. The Salmon was the easiest to cook. I read about this method on a couple of
places online but I couldn’t say where it originated. All you do is seal your salmon in a zip lock
bag and then turn your hot water tap on.
Once the water is as hot as it’s going to get, fill your sink up with
water. Place the Salmon in the sink and wait for 16 minutes. That’s it.
You can then just sear the Salmon in a hot pan and serve it as you like.

The Duck
breast I made was a little more involved – it needed to cook for at least 1
hour (or up to 3 hours) at 60 degrees.
This involved me getting a kitchen thermometer and measuring the temp
constantly as time progressed.

All I did
was bring the water to 60 degrees and then turn the heat down until it was able
to maintain that temp for a couple of minutes.
Then place the bag full of duck in there and hope for the best. I had a pot of cold water next to it and
would scoop out some hot water and add some cold every couple of minutes. Checking with the thermometer this seemed to
work pretty well. It did need to be
checked every couple of minutes and so you can’t really leave the kitchen if
you use this method. I had some WTF
podcasts to listen to on my ipod, which helped.
I cooked the Duck for about 75 minutes in the end and the fat under the
skin didn’t have time to properly render down.
It is recommended that Duck breast is SV’ed for a couple of hours at
least to allow for the fat and sinew to soften and melt away. The meat was good but the skin was way too chewy/fatty.

Sous Vide Duck breast

So today I
read about the Serious Eats method of using the thermos like qualities of an
esky (or ‘beer cooler’ if you’re American) to maintain heat for long periods
and SV’ing meat this way. So not quite a bucket but near enough.

There are
cuts of meat that are supposed to be SV’ed for 24-48 hours and if you were
going to do something like that you would need to go ahead and buy a machine –
but for me tonight, I’m going to be testing out the esky and seeing what kind
of results we get.

The thing I
love about the idea of using an esky is that it means that anyone can cook meat
using this method. It becomes a big
‘fuck you’ to any kind of exclusivity around SV purely due to the cost of
machinery or time standing over a pot.
Basically fill your esky with the right temperature water, throw your
meat in, place the lid on top and Serious Eats reckons you are good to go.

Everyone
has an esky. Everyone likes perfectly
cooked meat. This is the kind of set up
they make romantic comedies about. The
thing that is missing from this is getting the right temperature. I have a cooking thermometer ($15 online) now
but a lot of people might not. What I am
going to try and see is if there is a ratio of hot and cold water that will
provide the right temp to start off with and then I will gauge how long the
temp lasts for in my esky at home. The
lamb is going to cook for about an hour so let’s see how it goes.

Okay, with
a bit of further googling I found this page which details a mathematical method of estimating water temp by mixing hot and
cold water.

If we’re
using water from a freshly boiled kettle we’re looking at this being at around
95°C.
The tap water is more of an issue – it should be around 20 °C but I’ll
add a bit of a range of temps into the calculations below.

Cold water temp

Hot water temp

Ratio (rounded up)

Litres cold water

Litres hot water

End temp

15 degrees

95 degrees

1.3

3

4

58 - 60 degrees

20 degrees

95 degrees

1.15

3.5

4

58 - 60 degrees

25 degrees

95 degrees

1

4

4

58 - 60 degrees

If you’re unsure of your tap water temperature, leave it on
your kitchen bench for an hour or two before you need to use it then check what
the current temperature is using BOM or your in house gauge if you have one. Maybe a fridge magnet from Bali or something. Otherwise just take a guess at 20°C. Really this going to be a little hit and miss
but should work out okay. I’ll be
testing this out a bit more and will see what results I get.

So I was using about 600 grams of Lamb fillet. This will easily serve 5 people. The meat had been marinated for a couple of
days in garlic, basil and olive oil, inside the zip lock bag. I left the meat out of the fridge for an hour
or so to get closer to room temp Then the
zip lock bag went straight into the esky full of 60 degree water.

After about 30 mins I tested the water and it had dropped a
couple of degrees, which is actually what I wanted (57 degrees for medium rare –
assumed that the meat would lower the temp of the water). I had a kettle boiled and poured a little
water in every 15-20 mins to keep the temperature stable. About a cup each time. The lamb was in there for about 80 minutes in
the end. I checked on it about 4 times. It came out really beautifully and using this
method it really wasn’t that hard at all.

After it was out, I browned the outside a little by searing
it really quickly in a hot pan. It was
served with cous cous and some vegetables, some goats cheese crumbled on top.

I really enjoy cooking with this method – I don’t think
überjoi really cares how it’s cooked just as long as it’s not tough but
using the SV method you are guaranteed tender, perfectly cooked meat. It is so easy to do that it seems stupid not
to do it like this as long as you have the time.

The next time I’m using steak or lamb chops and will
probably use the esky method again. I’m
keen to even try cooking meat like this for a stir fry or for cumin lamb. For tougher cuts of meat I’ll probably still
go with my pressure cooker but nicer cuts of meat, breast, etc are going straight
to the esky from now on.

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